The Drip

This year, my mission is to clean out our house of things we don’t or won’t use, then sell them in a summer garage sale or donate to goodwill. I’m a big believer that if you keep “clutter” that you’re not using and/or don’t love, it’s only going to weigh you down. I sometimes get militant about the need to bulldoze these unused items out of our family’s lives.

I’ve been through our kitchen and bedroom, collecting things that need a new home. Among them were some pieces of jewelry, not particularly valuable, that would get better use from someone other than me. That meant going through the vanity dresser handed down to me from my grandmother, a piece that’s sentimental to me, as it connects three generations of the women in my family.

There’s a value to antique furniture, but it isn’t always monetary. Over the course of a piece’s lifetime, it collects stories. Even a scuffed old table can tell tales of family dinners, game nights, and school projects.

Sometimes when I open a little-used drawer of this vanity, a whiff of my grandmother’s perfume still drifts up from the decades it sat there. The vanity’s been mine for many years now, and I hardly use that one drawer, so weeks may go by without me actively thinking of my grandmother.

Then there’s the drip. I had seen it before, but it spent a while hiding under collected clutter in the top drawer. Once I cleaned out unused items, it peeked out again.

I thought about cleaning it up, then I remembered what it was: Grandma’s nail polish, the exact color she used to wear, tipped over in some accident prior to going out for an evening. Mental images of my grandmother, neatly dressed, hair done, makeup on, and the scent of her perfume all came rushing back, now completed with that nail color. What a treat to add that to my stash of family memories.

Because, even while you’re cleaning out the clutter, there are some things you need to keep.